But
you cannot jump over your own
shadow, as the German proverb has
it. If you are one of them, you
are stuck with it, and you are
doomed for ever to behave like
one.

Thursday,
November 15, 2001(Key West, Florida, USA)

A CORRESPONDENT tells me he was most
amused by Richard Gott'sreview
of Churchill's
War in the New Statesman and
particularly by Mr Gott's view that while
the book "should not be left around for
the servants to read" he nevertheless
would not want to prevent anyone from
publishing it. How very English of him,
writes my friend, who reminds me that the
same Mr Gott was obliged to resign as
Literary Editor of The Guardian on
Dec 8, 1994 after The Spectator
exposed him as an agent of the KGB. Gott,
it seems, was outed by Oleg
Gordievsky.

Gott put a
more favourable spin on these events
at the time -- he admitted innocently
taking money from the KGB and accepting
their hospitality. The trouble was, he had
kept all that a secret. His
Guardian colleagues called him "Pol
Pot" Gott, and published their
own version.

The Spectator invites literary
luminaries in its latest issue to comment
on their books of the year 2001.
Noteworthy is this contribution by
David Pryce-Jones, and his choice
is not an English book at all:

"This
year saw an extraordinary libel case.
Deborah Lipstadt called David
Irving a falsifier of history, and
he sued
her for it. It fell to Richard J.
Evans, professor of modern history
at Cambridge, to be the expert witness
providing the evidence to justify
Lipstadt's judgment. Evans's findings
in Lying for Hitler (Basic Books,
US$27) scupper Irving once and for all
with an elegance and finality rare in
scholarly books. Strange to say, no
English publisher has yet brought it
out."

Well, that is because any English
publisher who publishes Evans's lies
within range of the selfsame English law
courts knows very well what will hit
him.

What do we know about David P-J.? I
forget. Oh yes, he's Jewish. Who would'uv
guessed it from his name? But then the
same could be said of Robert
Maxwell, born Jan Hoch, and more than
a handful of others. Wheatcroft:
now what name sounds more English than
that? It proclaims its very Englishness in
a soft Somerset burr, without a
soupçon of venom in its veins.

I MENTION this otherwise totally
irrelevant factor, because so far the
literary community appears to me to be
polarized around that divide. "They" are
the ones who call the shots in New York at
the Publishers Weekly, Kirkus
Reviews, and the Library
Journal. They were the gang who
ambushed my book GOEBBELS.
MASTERMIND OF THE THIRD REICH
in April 1996, and wielded their famous
bludgeon
against St
Martin's Press of New York. They were
the ones who secretly pressured Macmillan
UK Ltd. And now they are the ones who,
across the board, are publicly vilifying
me; those of them who are my friends are,
in private, contemptuous of these literary
loudmouths, but it is the latter who have
always succeeded in dragging the former
into misfortune -- e.g. the tank ditches
of Riga -- with them.

Yes, David Pryce-Jones.
Double-barreled, and with a "y". I
particularly like the "y" -- a nice touch,
that: like the "y" that occasionally
whines its way into a Smith to produce a
somewhat better Smyth or even an
infinitely superior Smythe. Ye Olde
Pryce-Jones. Ye Olde Tudor-fronted,
oak-veneered Pryce-Jones. But you cannot
jump over your own shadow, as the German
proverb has it. If you are one of them,
you are stuck with it, and you are doomed
for ever to behave like one.

Take Stewart Stephen, who was
editor of the London Evening
Standard for a dozen years before the
admirable Max Hastings, who more
than once darkened my doors to come visit
me in Mayfair, or attend a cocktail party,
took over the editorial chair.

Mr S.S. -- how unfortunate to bear
those initials, in the circumstances --
decreed that my name was never again to
appear in his influential paper's pages. I
know so, because many years ago the young
Standard journalist Mark
Inglefield made the mistake of writing
up a story on me, and when he learned of
his blunder he was good enough to phone me
privately and tell me.

It reminds me that somewhere in my
dossier is a note on one Miriam Gross:
Ms. Gross (somehow I feel sure she is
a "Ms.") was once a producer of Channel
Four TV's "Bookchoice" programme, then
slithered into her present post at The
Sunday Telegraph where she is literary
editor. She mentioned to a member of my
staff that she had instructed that their
paper was never again to review a book by
me.

TIMES have changed. When that paper was
launched in 1962, their gallant first
editor Donald McLachlan, a personal
friend and former naval Intelligence
officer, commissioned a three-part serial
based on my book THE
DESTRUCTION OF
DRESDEN.

By 1967 that worthy newspaper's
stable-mate The Daily Telegraph had
inserted a page in its secret House Style
book, as Private Eye revealed,
ordering that I was never to be described
as "the historian", only as "the writer."
I told the then managing editor Maurice
Green that I cared not at all what
they chose to call me; but that, it seems,
is the way that these powerful newspapers
order things.

In
the circumstances, one is quite pleased
not to be called a historian, if that is
the price that has to be paid. Or should
that be Pryce? We know that his hero Evans
(right) was paid.
Donald McLachlan must be turning in his
grave when he sees what these nasty
upstarts are doing. In country after
country this self-appointed elite has
always acted the same way; and then they
bleat "Why us," when the angry wind
suddenly comes blowing the other way
across the prairies.

The AP
Wirephoto caption reads:"hgb-8) HAMBURG, April 25
[1983] (a) English
historian David Irving, joining
the press conference of STERN
magazine as reporter for West
German newspaper BILD, interrupts
the conference and shows faked
Hitler documents and claims that
STERN Hitler diaries were also
false. (AP WIREPHOTO) 1983
(Loh.string/Thomas Grimm
21625) 334

JUST as I am going to bed, a friend
somewhere in cyberspace sends me an
article from today's The Guardian
in London. I have jovially dubbed this
newspaper "Deathwish News" as they
continue to smear me, although they'll
soon be defending an action I have brought
against them in the High Court in London.
Today's squirt ("Top 10 literary hoaxes")
is poisonous enough to have been penned by
The Skunk himself. It seems that
bestselling author Tom Carew has
published a colourful account of his
adventures in Afghanistan, but according
to the Ministry of Defence, he never
served in the S.A.S. "Carew's stunt,"
The Guardian tells us, "is just the
latest in a long line of literary hoaxes,"
and it lists the ten biggest. The tenth
item is this:

The
Hitler diaries. In 1983 a German
magazine bought 62 volumes of the 'lost
diaries' of Adolf Hitler. They
contained such fascinating snippets of
Hitler's domestic life as "on my feet
all day long" and "must not forget to
get tickets for the Olympic Games for
Eva Braun." Historians Hugh
Trevor-Roper and David
Irving were fooled, and the Times
published extracts, but the forgeries
were eventually exposed as fakes, given
away by their historical inaccuracies
and anachronistic inks.

Of course exactly the opposite is true.
I do hope that nobody tells them about
their blunder, so that they can find out
all about it in court.